Profiles for a better life

"I want my little son to grow up with a knowledge on the lives of great people who lived in the past and those who live today," said the mother known to me, buying a whole pile of mini books from a bookshop. The list included names such as Einstein, Lincoln, Darwin, Marx, Marconi and a host of other names. I was simply surprised at this event.

"Are you not interested in stories and poems, and other supplementary readers?" I asked.

The smiling mother responded.

"My son has enough of those books. But he should know how people became great during their lifetime."

How one became great may be a debatable issue. A great personality for one may not be the same for another. But the simple ideology remains static. We are interested on knowing how a person achieved a greater state over the others. What are the factors that led one to be considered great?

[SUBHEAD] Great people

The terms 'profile studies' or 'halo studies' are known by the students of social sciences and humanities in most universities and higher seats of learning around the globe. The students are made to rediscover the events in the lives of great people and innovators, to achieve better perspectives on their visions.

But someone will say that bookshops and libraries are stacked with thousands of biographies written down the centuries.

True enough, they have to be seen from a new perspective from time to time. The biography of Charles Darwin which we have read at school could be seen from a different standpoint today. Physical sciences and interlinked subject areas of the subject have changed over the years paving the way for new visions and rediscoveries.

What made Darwin perceive the vision of evolution from today's standpoint might be a pertinent factor. Similarly many more questions could be raised. Great medical doctors have been discoverers in the field of medicine. Reading their profiles or biographies, one may tend to know more about them and the embedded subject matter from several viewpoints. Iris Murdoch, the English novelist, wrote a sort of a biography of French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre. It was an eye opener to the reader on matters pertaining to the philosophy of existentialism and creativity.

Conventional biographer

The attempt was more a rediscovery of what Sartre said, rather than a mere picture of his life from a conventional biographer's point of view. Brief encounters with great people have led to the writing of the life and thoughts of person who changed the world scene from what it used to be. My good benefactor, the consultant cardiologist Dr Ruvan Ekanayaka, says that he admires the great ideology of Chief Seattle, the Red Indian who could be observed as the greatest pioneer of environment preservation. He seems to believe that Seattle had a better and more sensitive vision on the factors pertaining to the much discussed topic of environment pollution and living conditions.

Dr Ekanayaka believes that Seattle adds more colour even to the field of medicine from another point of view. So this rediscovery is not a mere biographical study, but transcends its limits. To rediscover what Chief Seattle said I fished out a collection of famous speeches and writings of great people compiled by Ranjan Perera titled as 'Beyond the Words'. Herein, the reader finds a five-page speech which gives insight to what Seattle said as far back as 1854 addressing the representatives of the US president Franklin Pierce, when a request was made to purchase the land occupied by Seattle and his tribe. I wish to quote the following:

"Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside every valley, every plain and grave, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the island shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch."

New knowledge

Rediscovering what Seattle said may not be a mere study of the person, but a study of the vision of the man who said it. In India great persons like Gandhi are rediscovered in the light of new knowledge, which is denoted as anew dimensions, in communications. A study of a profile cannot be limited to a single area of study such as literature, philosophy and sociology.

A study of a profile of a person may transcend the narrow boundaries of such subjects, paving the way for the understanding of the humans and their existence, over the years. We often complain of a corrupted society and corrupted humans. One can visualize the phenomenon from various points of view. We talk of great teachers or maters. We talk of great creative artistes. Their examples in living ought to brighten our lives, and usher us into a better condition of living.

We talk of the great thinkers we have our own, and perhaps they are dead and gone. What remains is to perceive their life patterns, thoughts and actions. In short what they performed while they lived. Writing of a profile on such people can be short or long, depending on how it is written.

Dale Carnagie wrote a book titled 'Pen Portraits', if I remember, which I read as a schoolboy. That book inspired me to read more about them. Amarasiri Gunawadu wrote the biography of the great Sinhala writer Munidasa Cumaratunga titled 'Maha Hela Vatha'. On reading that book, long time ago, I visualized how great Cumaratunga had been as a dedicated scholar who ushered in a new literary era in the country. Cumaratunga, during his short span of life, had left no stone unturned in the investigation of the indigenous patterns of literary criticism and linguistic theories. His biography for the readers today is perhaps unheard of. The same is true about many more.

In the name of scholarship, trivialities have inevitably seeped in. This has overshadowed the actual social conscience of learning and living. The emphatic factor is that we need to read biographies or profiles of the great - a unit which executes literary trends seriously. Those written in the past have to be rediscovered. Those unwritten have to be written for posterity.

[email protected]